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Phillip Hughes at it again

"Patrick," says Marcus from the desk behind, stirring me from my post-prandial Su Doku. "Phillip Hughes is too short."

"That never stopped Bradman," I reply, adding that P Hughes is also too darn talented.

"No," says Marcus pointing to the Cricinfo screen that he monitors constantly while crossing out dodgy items from my colleagues' expense claims. "Two short. He's on 98, about to get another hundred."

Actually Hughes, who is a full foot shorter than his 6ft 7in Middlesex team-mate Steven Finn, added only one more before the rain started to fall at Southgate but he will no doubt start piling on the runs again soon, adding another century to go with scores of 118, 64* and 75 in his three previous innings for Middlesex. A shrewd signing by Gus Fraser, Middlesex's director of cricket.

That fourth-ball duck he made on Test debut in February seems quite a while back. Since then, he has scored more than 770 runs at an average of 110. I fear this short kid could be quite useful. Just remember that he owns an Italian passport through his mamma, so only half of any runs he scores this summer count for Australia and the rest are European (or in the absence of Italy having a Test side, English).

Unlike many, though, I'm not opposed to Australians coming over here for a few games to get their eye in before the Ashes. Sure they're nicking the space of a young English batsman, but that happens with the Kolpaks anyway. And as long as Hughes, Clark and possibly Lee are getting some county cricket here, there is a chance that they could do themselves a nasty injury.

Perhaps Fraser could be persuaded to leave a few stray balls scattered around the outfield when Middlesex are warming up next week. An ankle could easily turn...

Support your county

Despite the tired old stereotype about county cricket being watched by two men and a dog, the domestic game has a strong and loyal following, most of whom have strong and loyal opinions about the teams they follow (strongly and loyally), especially when things are going wrong.

Ged Ladd of the Middlesex Till We Die supporters' forum has compiled a portal of the county forum websites that he is aware of, which I am happy to link to here should any of you want to find a place in the blogosophere where you can find like-minded souls who want to reminisce wistfully about the days of John Emburey or complain noisily about the number of South Africans playing in the Midlands.

The Rest is silenced

Alex Massie has written a thoughtful piece on his Spectator blog about the relevance of the County Championship that is worth reading. In precis, he writes:

Performances for your county have ceased to have much relevance when it comes to selecting the England Test team. The best English players almost never play for their county. It becomes increasingly difficult to measure the worth of runs scored or wickets taken in the championship.

Meanwhile, the proliferation of overseas and Kolpak players must have a detrimental effect. The hired guns are the players burdened with expectation. It is their responsibility to take the crucial wickets or score the vital runs. If the English players fail, well there's the overseas men to bail them out. In other words, not enough English players are given the responsibility of leadership.

So what's to be done? Two old matches, long since abandoned, could be revived to offer high-quality cricket and permit the best English players to test themselves against one another. In June they should revive the old North vs South match. Later in the summer you could also revive the England vs The Rest fixture. These games would act as a kind of test trial. At the very least they would give county players a fair chance to impress while reminding the Test players that their places must be justified by more than the ownership of a nice, fat central contract.

I think Alex is on to something here although I'm too young to remember North v South games or England v The Rest. North v South was a fixture that began back in 1836 and was held almost every year until 1961 when a South side including Godfrey Evans, Don Shepher and Peter Richardson beat a North team that had Brian Close, Ray Illingworth and Cyril Washbrook.

Imagine a similar fixture today, although first we should diplomatically decide what is North and what is South. To balance the sides, let's put Notts, Leics, Warwicks and Derbys in the North. These, then, could be the putative teams:

North Vaughan, Wagh, Bell, Collingwood, Patel, Flintoff, Mustard, Broad, Sidebottom, Swann, Hoggard

South Cook, Strauss, Key, Pietersen, Bopara, Prior, Mascarenhas, Khan, Tremlett, Jordan, Panesar

Looks juicy, doesn't it?

The last England v the Rest match, billed as a Test trial, was in 1976 when the aspiring Rest were captained by Mike Brearley and included Chris Old and Phil Edmonds. It was something of a sporadic feast even then, though. The fixture began in 1911 and was used most years in the 1920-1940s but started to become infrequent. There was a match in 1997 between England A v The Rest, in which a young Michael Vaughan was bowled for 10 and 1 by Alex Tudor and Simon Brown, but it has not been played since.

Something similar should be brought back. The England Lions play Australia and the West Indies this summer, but not England. It would be a fascinating match to pit the haves against the wannabes.

Gatt is back

There's a new Gatt in town and his name is Joe.

Joe Gatting is the nephew of Mike and he has made his first-class debut today for Sussex against Cambridge in just about as emphatic a way as you can.

The 21-year-old has just been dismissed for 152 off 156 balls. He went into bat at No 3, about 45 minutes before lunch, had made 102 before tea and then within less than an hour had made 50 more before being out.

I wonder if he likes his tea as much as his uncle. No word on whether Uncle Gatt's favourite cheese and pickle sandwiches were on offer at Fenner's, but clearly something galvanised him.

Joe has played only one second XI game for Sussex and was given a two-year contract on the back of making 110 against Surrey in a one-day game on their pre-season tour to Abu Dhabi. He clearly has something special about him, although I imagine he is not built on similar lines to Fat Gatt given that he old has played 44 games of football for Brighton and Hove Albion. Then again, Botham played football...

The cynics will say "Ah but this was only Cambridge University, runs against them barely count". To which I blow a big raspberry and point out that Ed Joyce, who is so good that he has played international cricket for two countries, made 143 runs fewer for Sussex today than Thin Gatt.

Aussies scupper England hopefuls

Three aspiring England players, each desperate for a recall to the national side, had been sitting in the Pavilion playing Twister or reading Belloc - or whatever former England players do during rain breaks - for a day and a half before the showers finally ended and their opportunity came today. Rob Key, Michael Vaughan and Ian Bell were desperate to take advantage of an outing for MCC at Lord's to push their claims for a place in this summer's Test matches.

Reader, they blinked. Key made five while Bell and Vaughan made 12 each. Key and Bell were each dismissed by Callum Thorp, a 34-year-old from Perth. I'd have thought that Australians would have wanted Bell back in the Test side this summer, but Thorp has British parents so maybe he is a bit confused. Maybe he should get a Test call-up with figures of 4-15 in 13 overs today.

Vaughan was dismissed by Mitchell Claydon, another Aussie with a British passport. Unlike Thorp, Claydon has peroxide hair and is a keen surfer so we can assume he is fair dinkum, as they say.

The only Englishmen to emerge with much credit today were Stephen Moore, the Worcestershire opener, and Tom Westley, the 20-year-old all-rounder from Essex. Westley made 18* off 69 balls, which shows a certain maturity, while Moore made 45. He was born in South Africa, but when has that ever stopped someone from playing for England?

Blackwell records first ton

Congratulations to Ian Blackwell, who has made the first hundred of this county season. Blackwell, formerly of Somerset, was a shrewd close-season signing by Durham and is one reason why the bookmakers have them as 7-2 favourites to defend their title.

Durham reached 316-4 against MCC a little while ago before rain returned for a third time in the match. Hard to see why the IPL decided not to come here, although to be fair there were 72 overs bowled yesterday between the brief showers. Rain comes and goes in England at this time of year but rarely washes out a whole day.

And we're off...

The county season is under way. Rob Key won the toss for MCC and put Durham into bat just now at Lord's in the traditional curtain-raiser. I was at Lord's this morning, although Richard Hobson is covering the game for us, and the prospect of starting on time looked slim. Grey skies, spots of rain starting to fall, and the players wearing several layers as they warmed up. Don't you just love an English summer?

UPDATE: The cricket season lasted 67 balls before it started raining. Who had 11.1 overs in the sweepstake for the first rain delay of the year?

Incidentally, those good folks at Cricinfo have entered into a partnership with someone called Snaptu so that you can get free up-to-date cricket scores on your mobile phone. Worth a look, although obviously you'll want to read the match reports at Times Online.

Durham: county champions

Many congratulations to Durham, who won their first County Championship yesterday after only 16 years as a first-class side. Somerset, Gloucestershire and Northants are still waiting for their first after a rather longer wait. I was away this weekend so didn't get the chance to comment on this, but I will run a special Durham-themed quiz tomorrow to mark the occasion.

I don't mind admitting that I was premature when, after only a session of the final round of games, I called the Championship in Nottinghamshire's favour (well, I said they were very well placed, which goes to show that you should always wait until both sides have batted before making any claims). So much for Kent's celebrated batting, which failed twice in the final match to ensure that they pipped Sussex and Yorkshire to relegation.

Durham's route to the title has been due to their excellent team spirit, with various people stepping forward to take responsibility and few stand-out performers. Only Michael di Venuto, and he only just, passed 1,000 runs in the Championship and only three batsmen who played more than half the fixtures finished with an average above 22. In bowling, they relied on Mark Davies, Callum Thorp and especially Stephen Harmison for most of their wickets but their rotation system brought forth other wicket-takers. They claimed fewer batting points than four of the eight teams below them and fewer bowling points than five others. But most importantly they won more games than anyone else.

Harmison's return of 60 wickets in 12 matches at an average of 22 is brilliant. My friend Will Luke says that we journalists (including himself) should be eating humble pie because we doubted Harmison's ability to perform in the lower game, having been dropped by England. But to be fair to the media, Harmison himself had said at the start of the season that he was thinking about walking away from the first-class game all together if England didn't recall him. His mind wasn't on taking 60 wickets for Durham then.

"Do we owe Harmison an apology?" Will asks. Well, no, I don't think we do. As I wrote at the time, Harmison at the start of the season did not look like someone who was enjoying his cricket, at all levels of the game. A return to county cricket could have killed the final trace of motivation, but instead it reinvigorated him. He discovered that he could take wickets a bit more easily than at Test level and he liked being slapped on the back. It had a snowball effect that led to his revival as an England player. But he would never have come again for England if he hadn't started enjoying his time with Durham.

So we don't owe him an apology for questioning his application. But we certainly owe him an immense "hurrah" and lots of praise for the way he has played himself back into form. Durham backed him and so England recalled him and he delivered for them as well. We are all winners. So much for county cricket being pointless.

The Leading All-Rounder

At this time of the season, I am always distressed by how badly all-rounders have fared in the County Championship. The days of players ending the season with 1,000 runs and 100 wickets to their name in first-class games are now past - Franklyn Stephenson, left, was the last one to do this and that was 20 years ago. A more realistic qualification for the leading all-rounder is 750 runs and 50 wickets. So who has got there?

Only ten bowlers have taken 50 wickets this season, with four or five others who could get there in the final match of the season. Of them, only three have made more than 500 runs: Tim Bresnan (44 wickets and 506 runs), Graeme Wagg (59 wickets and 536 runs) and Adil Rashid (56 wickets and 587 runs, including a hundred in the latest game). So it looks as if the winner will be either Wagg or Rashid, but both will be little more than half the man, statistically, that Stephenson was.

This is about more than just fewer matches being played these days. Stephenson played 22 matches for his 1000/100 in 1988, while Rashid and Wagg have had 18 and 16 respectively. You would expect them to be behind but not that far. It seems that counties don't develop - or even buy in - players who can excel in both disciplines all season.

A lot of us had high hopes of Rashid after he made 837 runs and took 43 wickets last year (the leading all-rounder by some way, although the Cricket Society gave their award for the best all-rounder to Peter Trego, who scored one run less than Rashid and took ten fewer wickets), but he has taken a step backwards with the bat and a small step forwards with the ball. Here's hoping he remembers next season that he can do a fine job with both.

Notts close in on county title

Only one session into the final round of County Championship matches and Nottinghamshire are about as perfectly placed as you would like. Leading by eight points anyway, a win without any bonus points would be enough for them to take the title, while Durham and Somerset have to win and hope that Notts only draw.

At lunch, though, Somerset are almost out of it, having slipped to 96 for five against Lancashire. So much for Taunton being a batsman's paradise. Unless Somerset's bowlers can peg the visiting side back in their first innings, it looks like game over in Taunton. Durham have started well at Canterbury, taking three wickets for 82 but Kent bat a long way down.

Meanwhile, Notts could render the Canterbury game academic. They have Hampshire 83 for four, picking up a first bonus point. As ever, you can read session-by-session reports from our writers in the field here.